Portnoy's Complaint!

I got about twenty pages in before I said to Roth/Portnoy in absentia, "All right, already, I get it, you hate your mother" and threw the book across the room.

But I don't hate all of Roth's books; in fact I was quite impressed by The Plot against America and enjoyed The Human Stain. Perhaps if we could file Portnoy's Complaint under "puerile juvenilia" I'd be satisfied.

Mmmm...same problem here with Goodbye, Columbus. My reaction to that, over and over, was "What did you think was going to happen??!!"
The Human Stain couldn't have been written by the same guy, could it? :)

Confess I have the opposite reaction. The more politically earnest Roth of later years is to me less fun. But definitely safer.

I found it enjoyable, but no great shakes. However, the line "I am the Raskolnikov of jacking off"... priceless.

Krolik: Safer? I don't get it.

Scratch: When I wrote that I was thinking of American Pastoral and that political themes in that book seem safer or more predictable to me than the anarchic sexual impulse you find in Portnoy. And, sex jokes aside, the prose is more sprightly, less plodding.